Summary
Bruce Goebel argues that humorous texts help students develop critical reading skills and promote social justice issues.
Definitions
Polysemy – coexistance of multiple meanings for a word or phrase
Notes
- Emotionally draining reading can dissuade students from engaging with further texts – Paul Beatty given as an example: ‘I already know why the caged bird sings…’ (pg. 48)
- The emotional work of engaging with literature may be debilitating for students.
- Claudia Cornett: ‘humor provokes interest’.
- Social justice humour: ‘explicitly identifies and challenges bias and corresponding inequities.’ (pg. 48)
- Don Kelly (Ojibway stand-up comedian): ‘…if you can keep them laughing, they’ll keep listening.’
- ‘Humour can be a kind of Trojan horse, getting a hostile audience to open doors, or minds, in ways they wouldn’t in a more direct conversation.’ (pg. 49)
- Challenges of teaching humour include the fact that humour can just as easily be regressive a it can be progressive.
- Teachers must carefully select humourous texts.
- Students need to learn the difference between positive humour and negative humour.
- The language of humour is unstable. There are wide interpretations, students may not ‘get’ it. To remedy this you can offer prereading guidance.
- Students must be taught strategies and rhetorical tools used in humorous texts.
- Suggests using short pieces of social justice humour in between analysis of somber texts.
- Humour can help dissect intersectional identities – humorous contradictions and similarities between the different spheres of interest.
- Social media memes as ways of combating prejudice in media.
Reflection
Goebel puts into writing experiences I have personally had while teaching. In particular, the emotional exhaustion caused by over exposure to tragic/troubling/serious works. I’ve also witnessed students light up again when something funny appears.
The piece spends time suggesting ways to put pieces of media side by side to analyse the social justice humour. This is something I want to do on the podcast – but the humour would come from either the ridiculousness of the sources or through the conversational analysis with a guest.
I agree with the need to carefully frame humour for students in class so that they understand when irony is being used. I wonder if it is possible or necessary to do the same for a podcast episode where I cannot see or control the audience. It would be good to get feedback on this from my listening ‘parties’.
References
Goebel, B. (2018) ‘What’s So Funny about Social Justice?’, The English Journal, 107(6), pp. 48–53.
